Google has reached a preliminary settlement in another class action lawsuit. This time, the company is accused of tracking users in incognito mode, for which it faces a payout of up to 5 billion dollars in damages. How will the process unfold further?
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In 2020, a class action lawsuit against Google was filed in the District Court of California, in which "millions of users" accused the giant of a series of privacy violations, dating back to June 2016. The people involved in the case accused the company that its analytical tools, cookies, and applications allow it to track user activity in the Google Chrome browser even when it is in incognito mode.
This was supposed to turn the browser itself into an "unsupervised treasure trove of information" about interests, shopping habits, and "potentially embarrassing things" about users. As compensation, they demanded a minimum of $5,000 for all involved parties, and the total compensation amount was around $5 billion.
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According to the latest reports from Reuters, Google agreed to enter into a preliminary agreement on the matter and admitted to secretly tracking users just before the end of 2023. The terms of the settlement have not yet been disclosed to the public, but the lawyers involved in the negotiations stated that the agreed provisions are binding. They will officially be presented on February 24, 2024 - the presiding judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers has postponed the trial date to this day.
The same judge in August 2023 also rejected Google's motion to dismiss the lawsuit, arguing that the court was unable to determine whether users actually consented to the company's collection of browsing history information. In her opinion, Google never directly informed about such a fact.
It is also worth noting that this is another case in recent weeks where Google is being held accountable for the way it conducts its business. In mid-December, the company lost a lawsuit over illegal monopolistic actions with Epic Games studio, as a result of which it will be forced to pay 700 million dollars in compensation.
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